Taking the Square Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong are both lecturers in media and communication at the University of Leicester.Taking the Square provides an innovative perspective on civic resistance and social movement including case studies from the Arab uprisings to the indignados movement and Occupy. Contributors show how embodied protest events, assemblies and performances challenge conventional notions of media visibility to create new public spaces. Finally a book on culture, media and protest in Western and non-Western contexts.
- Nicole Doerr, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Copenhagen,
Informative and insightful, this is a truly stimulating volume that captures the essence of recent social movements. Facilitated by digital media, this latest tidal wave of global activism has a strong spatial orientation. As the book shows, the protest strategies are diverse and dynamic in connecting, swarming, and repurposing the digital as well as the spatial.
- Jack Qiu, Associate Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong,
This is a powerful collection of essays that is of high relevance to media and communication scholars focusing on protest movements as well as social movement scholars interested in the power of media and communication to organize and mobilize. The essays are thought-provoking and varied in how they approach the phenomenon of occupation and spatiality.
- Bart Cammaerts, Associate Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics,
From the Arab uprisings to the indignados movement and the global Occupy sit-ins, recent protests and civil unrest have sparked new debates about political organisation, media representation and the nature of contemporary citizenship. But is there anything new about these occupations of public space? How are these protests legitimised or undermined by the intense mediation of streets and squares? And how are these different from expressions of dissent in other contexts, including those of ethnic minorities in the New Orleans mardi gras and survivors of natural disaster in the Philippines?
This book challenges the notion of a ‘disappearance of public space’ by reconsidering the significance of physical space and embodiment in the conduct and consequences of protest events. Looking at a range of assemblies–sustained and fleeting, spectacular and ordinary–this volume illuminates how square and street politics and their mediation become vehicles for new ideas of community, citizenship and public life.
The series uses the idea of political subjection to promote the discussion and analysis of individual, communal, civic and participation and activism. Radical subjects refers both to the character of the topics and issues tacked in the series and to the ethic guiding the research. The series has a radical focus in that it provides a springboard for the discussion of activism that sits outside or on the fringes of institutional politics, yet which, insofar as it reflects a commitment to social change, is far from marginal. In a period marked, on the one hand, by a growing disengagement from parliamentary democracy and, on the other, by extraparliamentary activism (evidenced in struggles for global justice, ecological campaigning, local community projects and the embrace of utopian aspirations), the series provides a platform for scholarship that interrogates modern political movements, probes the local, regional and global dimensions of activist networking and the principles that drive them, and develops innovative frames to analyse issues of exclusion and empowerment.
Series Editor: Ruth Kinna